When your heart feels pounding and palpating, you know it must be something truly great. (This applies to books and scientific writings too.) The Great Smoky Mountains are great, and here you can always count on nature to make wonders.
It could be a sunny warm space that suddenly opens up while hiking down into the mountains on a cold morning.
It could be a waterfall surprisingly tall and beautiful a few stairs up after driving by a campground and a small pond crowded with fishing rods, or shrouded in green at an abrupt turn (not even a hint) after walking through a sugar maple forest filled with morning light and then climbing over a hill of “ghost” trees with a panorama view of a flammant mountain, or flowing down from one side of a creek while you are looking for it somewhere down stream.
Stepping carefully on the footbridges back and forth a singing stream several times to a shelter in the mountains, you cannot help pressing on. The mountain path narrows and turns, spiraling up. You listen to tree leaves falling in a little rain and try to figure out fall’s color palette: golden tulip, black birch, yellow birch, American beech, mockernut hickory, sugar maple, red maple, scarlet oak, witch hobble, sourwood, dogwood, sassafras, sweetgum, and black gum; all of a sudden you find yourself among treetops and colors, and you have the whole mountain to yourself. But how could you take a picture of a whole mountain from within?
